My Petition For More Space

by John Hersey

  I heard Maisie’s challenge about my responsibility for the break-up with my wife. Was my wife’s problem about having sex under others’ eyes something I somehow foisted on her, as I made the effort to free myself of the need for privacy which I had somehow caught from my out-of-step parents?

  How do I know that Maisie does not have hard eyes? It does not seem to matter to her whether my face is a face in a novel or one in a film. To her, it seems, a face is a face—just an interchangeable oval something. My need for space includes a need to be seen whole, myself, and of course then to be recognized.

  To those who do not see me, I am a spoiler. How wrong they are!

  But perhaps all those who do not see me have hard eyes, anyway, and can only see what they choose to see—have eyes which seem to see what is actually there but which distort, which substitute stale images for fresh ones, which blur and confuse and then convince; and which play these tricks because for so very long nothing has been hidden.

  * * *

  —

  DESPITE THE FIERCE crowd pressure here near the head of the line, the janitor manages to get his hands up, and, beating the air like a mad conductor, he starts a new chant.

  ‘Get out of the line! Get out of the line! Get out of the line! Get out of the line!…’

  He shouts this command, looking at me, his nose slicing the morning, half a dozen times before a single other voice takes it up. Then some others join in, here one, there another. The first few to chime in are at some distance from us. Apart from him, none of my touchers or touchers’ touchers gives voice.

  Maisie turns her head and, her cheek twisted, shouts to the janitor, ‘Stop it! Stop it!’

  I sense that she is trying to push outward with her arms, against the teacher and the cigar man. Is this because the janitor’s chant has frightened her, and she needs more room to inhale the breath of fear, or is she trying somehow to make space for us? Below her waist she has given me signals that she knows, and accepts, my delinquency.

  She has tried to sandwich her shouts of protest between the sentences of the chant. But nothing can stop the janitor now. His eyes, with only the bundleboard of the nose between them, are inflamed, passionate. He thinks he has the ump where he wants him now.

  Any crowd is like dry grass to the flames of any rhythmic cry, and this fire quickly spreads. There is not the exuberance this time that there was in the shouts on behalf of the woman who had fainted. That was a rescue; we cheered her up the line; there was a bubble of laughter under the sound in each throat. Now the janitor’s voice beside me is a croak; the chant is dreary in its viciousness.

  I see the fullness under the jaw of the cigar man begin to pulse in time with the janitors arms. Too bad; he has gone over. Does he have any idea what the movements beside his right arm and thigh mean? I have seen him look at Maisie once or twice, his eyes like bits drilling into her intentions. Does he think that she is trying to nestle closer to him?

  He is shouting with a full throat, ‘Get out of the line! Get out of the line!…’

  The grandmother screams at me, a motherly tenderness in her eyes, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Does she think she could have spared me this trouble—if only I had been a talker?

  Maisie has given up trying to silence the janitor. She is shaking her head slowly. Down there—she must know the law….

  I hear Handlebars’ penetrating drone now, in phase with the rhythm. He would join in any movement that promised satisfaction of any kind; perhaps he just likes to shout.

  Nothing yet from the painter.

  I wonder if they could really force me out of the line. Everyone knows I have a right to be on it. They are breaking the law. Mob action in waitlines is far more cruelly punished than, say, a man’s indiscretion toward a blonde with wispy curls at the back of her neck. The chanters are conspiring in a gross felony. Should I warn the janitor?…It would do no good. He is at the mercy of an impulse nothing could stop now. He has a hurtling terror of wanting anything as much as he wants space.

  * * *

  —

  HE HAS CHANGED the shout. Now he barks out just one word, over and over and over: ‘Out!…Out!…Out!…Out!…Out!…’

  The abbreviation catches on.

  Now much of the line is engaged. Crowd transcendence has set in. The mere rhythm, without any content or meaning, grips each person, lifts each person out of his skin and into the soul of the crowd. Of those near me, only the girl and the grumpy painter are silent now. The grandmother rocks her head back and forth with each shout. I see that many of the pedestrians, who have no idea what this is about, have taken up this simpler rhythm: ‘Out!…Out!…Out!…’ The blue pompon on the red cap sharply bobs with each explosion. Into the memory bank in my brain go stretching jaws, mouths around the ow sound, pumping cowlicks, a dance of ears.

  It occurs to me that if I am forced out of the line I may never see Maisie again.

  I lean down to her ear and shout, ‘Where do you live?’

  She seems to understand, turns her head, shouts something which is swallowed into the rhythmic noise. For a horrible moment I think she is shouting, ‘Out!’

  ‘I can’t hear!’

  She turns her head and screams three words, and this time I do hear: ‘Change your mind!’

  * * *

  —

  SHOULD I? I wonder now: Should I?

  Her meaning is not the janitor’s. She is not thinking of herself. I trust she is thinking of me. Perhaps I can believe that she is selfish in the sense that she may want a future relationship with me; she may not want the object of that relationship to be in danger. This object does not yet have a face, but it has an expressed value below the belt. Yes…. Yes…. Yes….

  Out!…Out!…Out!…Out!…Out!…Out!…

  The crowd in the line is mindless now. It has a single pulse and a single need—a scapegoat. Tragedy—the scapegoat’s song?

  The reason I wonder whether I should change my mind has to do, in the first instance, with Maisie. If she can think of me, I can also think of her. Will my petition endanger hers? The grandmother says she has no chance anyway. But supposing she presents her case well; supposing I am at the next window; supposing the official anger really is of the sort the janitor has imagined….

  I am capable of thinking beyond Maisie to others in the line. Desire is expansive; infatuation opens out horizons. Or, to put the thought in its frankest form (some think frankness honesty): One who feels lust is not cut off from others. Desire has made me resemble my mother. I am suddenly charitable. Will I endanger the petitions of others besides Maisie? Proteins, Havanas, a skill, a baby, a lottery…Strange! I don’t know what the petition is of the one person I think of as an ally, besides Maisie—the grump behind me, still not chanting. Do I want to endanger whatever it is he wants?

  But a selfish thought, after all, wins out. I shout again in Maisie’s ear, ‘Where do you live?’ I do not want to lose her.

  This is the first time in my life I have had a persons address screamed at me. In the midst of all my distraction I try to chisel it into my memory: 240 Park Street. Has Maisie enough space? Surely not!

  I am on the point of changing my mind.

  Not that I care about the threat of the chant. It excites me. I am not only charitable; I am enlarged.

  Bad questions: Would it do any good to change my mind? Could I make myself heard? Even if I did, would that make any difference? Does this crowd want a sacrifice more than it wants an idea? Give the janitor an inch—will he want a mile? Does he hate me now more than my petition?

  I nevertheless decide to shout at him between outs. I think I will accede. My mouth is open.

  A scream. Match heads.

  It almost seems as if the tearing scream is coming out of my own mouth.

  It is so frightful that I cannot tell whether it causes or comes from the fear I feel.<
br />
  I recognize at once what it is. It is line-sickness. Danger.

  It goes on and on. It cuts right through the crowd-shout. It is behind me.

  5

  IS IT THE PAINTER, who has not taken part in the chant? Has he been trying with all his strength to hold himself together? Is it he?

  There is a metallic edge to the scream.

  Already my touchers, and theirs, and theirs, have stopped shouting. The janitors arms are still pumping, but his throat seems to have dried up.

  My desire has fled; tenderness remains. Maisie, like everyone else, must be afraid. I want more than ever to enfold her—to lessen my own fear by showing my concern for hers.

  Now I recognize that sound of brass in the held shriek. It is not in the painter’s voice. This comes from the neck of the young man with the mustache. The metallic sound is an enlargement, by a hundredfold, of the penetrating, boring sound of his hedonism which I heard earlier.

  I see the panic on the grandmother’s face—she who makes parties out of waitlines. The scream is right behind her.

  The cigar man’s head jerks from side to side.

  Line-sickness is so catching. If rhythm can spread like fire in a crowd, this can explode. A sick line is a writhing mass of the damned.

  The scream has been going on for only about ten seconds, but already I can barely hear in the distance: Out!…Out!…Out!…

  The janitor is no longer pumping. He cannot get his arms down. He holds them up, like a man who has lost his will and wants to surrender.

  * * *

  —

  STRANGE THAT it should be Handlebars who could not bear waiting any longer. He has seemed to have such a thick skin. Are the selfish after all most vulnerable? No, that is too easy. There are kinds and kinds of selfishness. His is all sensory. Also, he is a particular sort of hedonist: a stupid hedonist. His dreary drone; his feathery mustaches—he has constructed a face for himself, perhaps a whole character for himself, out of a Zamport movie, one of those memory-Westerns. But the film has suddenly slipped off the sprockets of the projector, the sound track is horribly askew.

  * * *

  —

  THE SCREAM goes on and on. The out-chant has died. The crowd has forgotten the spoiler. Every one of us is holding on tight. Each knows that if he—or his neighbor—gives way, then another more easily gives way; the chain reaction starts.

  If it must be known, none of us can bear any of this any longer.

  My own alarm, terrible as it is, is abated by my concern for Maisie. How can I get a message of comfort or of courage to her? Words would not penetrate the scream-tone. Can I take the risk of moving my hands? Would it help her if I did?

  My view of the line ahead is of rigidity. Each person, eyes front, holds his head firmly in place, as if by immobility to lock the wild beast of the line-sickness out of his skull.

  Handlebars seems never to take a breath; his scream somehow eternally renews itself. His pain, from being crowded too long, is hideous. His is the blatant, penetrating, awry, monotonous rage of a stuck bus horn.

  The pedestrians no longer move. No pedestrians face looks our way. Heads are held stiffly toward the Green.

  Are the birds silent in the great cages?

  The traffic has stopped.

  The entire morning has seized up. We are figures in a photograph.

  There is motion. I feel Maisie’s body trembling.

  I slowly slide my flat hands forward—we are so hard pressed that it takes all my strength—and I grasp her hips. Her head droops back toward mine. Good! My solicitude becomes strength and pours into her flanks through my palms.

  The back of a hand is against the back of my left hand. I see the cigar man’s head make a quarter turn to the right, but the wind of the scream soon blows it back straight again.

  * * *

  —

  THE TEACHER breaks. A second siren in a second throat, this one higher-pitched.

  Danger! Danger! Not twice as great as before: a thousand times greater.

  I can see the teachers face lifted to send up to the sky, like a factory’s pollution, all the poison of all the years of her disapprobation, forced out of her now by her being so sick of this crowd-pressure. Her throat is swollen; it can hardly contain the fund of the scream yet to come.

  * * *

  —

  THERE IS A NEW sound. Under the horrible harmonic fifth of the two screams it seems far away. Yet it is near me, too.

  Is it the beginning of a third scream in a third larynx nearby?

  It is louder now. It is behind me. It is the painter. He is singing.

  I recognize the song—a strange song that has been popular lately, a corrupted lullaby, commonly sung to a rather crisp and even danceable time. There are so few children allowed now that real lullabies are no longer current; this song is a queer relic. It seems to me to have odd subliminal elements from some alienated culture of long ago—surely the baby who is being lulled is not tiny; it strikes me that it may be in its teens. Amazing that the painter would know this song! What he does know—has remembered before any of the rest of us—is that if anything can hold a line together when these screams freeze the air, it is singing.

  Another voice has taken up the song—that of the black woman to the painter’s right; a huge, orotund contralto tone of hymn-singing habit, wishful, mournful, visionary, knowing hell, yearning for what has so long been promised: another land, another way.

  Now, of all people, the janitor joins in, fortissimo.

  The big ear-ripping fifth still goes on. Others are beginning to hear the song and take it up. Both Maisie and I do. The grandmother belts it out.

  Now the janitor’s arms are pumping again to the fast beat of the song:

  Cry, little beebee, cry if you will.

  Rock and split and dip and roll.

  Sleep, little beebee, sleep if you can;

  Mums up in crumbtown holding your hand.

  Mums in the cakehouse; sleep, sleep.

  Bread’s in the bank, dear; drip, drip.

  Suck…suck…suck…suck…

  Cry, little beebee, cry if it spills.

  Sleep, little beebee, down a downer.

  Cry, little beebee, sleep, steep.

  All along the line voices take hold of the song.

  * * *

  —

  I AM AMAZED by the janitor, leading the song to save us all—including Is he some kind of idiot who just cannot help waving his arms when any repetition offers itself? No, no, it is more than that. His nose is slicing up and down, a baton of hope; his dog eyes encourage me. ‘Sing! Sing!’ the eyes say. It comes to me that he is the sort of human being who will survive. He will survive anything. Storm, famine, mob, war, massacre, pressure of numbers. In order to survive, he will with even-handed equanimity destroy and rescue. Partner and enemy, chopper and baton, coward and hero—he conducts equally well on alternating and direct current. I think now that I could despise him even if he hadn’t put me in mortal danger. Look at the happy little eyes encouraging his brother to sing!

  The screams persist, but the lullaby blankets us—a fire-fighters’ foam.

  The painter is something else. As I roar the song I remember how his crankiness annoyed me at first. I did not want any part of knowing him. How often in my life I have misjudged people!

  * * *

  —

  IKEEP LISTENING for a third scream. The sound goes round and round. Without actually realizing it at the time of doing it, I have pushed my hands farther forward; my left forearm crosses uncomfortably between the Havana man’s arm and Maisie’s hip. She is now singing loud. I know that I am inwardly safe now, despite being bracketed by the two continuing screams; and I believe, from the way her throat swells with the lullaby, that Maisie is safe, too, even though one of the screams is
right beside her.

  Mums in the cakehouse, sleep, sleep…

  I hear the painter now shouting at the top of his voice to Handlebars, who is screaming beside him. It’s all right!’ the painter roars. ‘We’re almost there! Ten minutes! Look at the doors! It’s okay! We’re almost to the doors!’ And soon, like a noon siren winding down at the end of its high-pitched shriek, Handlebars’ sickness leaves him on a dying fall.